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Thursday, April 24, 2014

burning through history

The invitation to meet with the station
chief of McLan Docking Station isn’t something anyone on it can
refuse. The current chief is Sora and she’s been the station chief
longer than I’ve been here. I’ve never met her and never wanted
to: you only meet a station chief in person as a mechanic if you do
something flat-out amazing or awful and I’m not the kind of person
to want fame. My quarters are small: a transfer doesn’t need much,
after all. In my case it was mostly space to pace about on my treads
while thinking about things. I’ve almost finished cleaning up for
moving in with Orien when the message hit over the infoweb.

I listen to it twice to make sure its
real and ping Orien with a copy and ask if he’ll come. He replies
asking me to meet him outside his quarters and to keep my projection
turned off; nothing else. McLan has gone through a hiring phase
recently, so I’ve been keeping it up most of the time. People see
Dar and its a mechanic in his twenties with an easy smile, not a
transfer; not a cylindrical shape with treads for legs, limbs coming
out of my chassis as needed and a viewscreen with a ‘face’ for
ease of interaction. I don’t like keeping the projection always up
because it feels like I’m lying to people, but enough people know
what I am to tell newcomers anyway.

Orien is waiting outside his quarters
when I arrive, his synth limbs registering stresses. All of his limbs
and some of his torso are artificial, after a bomb: no one would know
it to look at him. I frown in the viewscreen, scanning a little
deeper into his apps and linkages. “You ran here.”

“This isn’t a casual invitation,
Dar.” Nothing else, as he heads down the corridor to the
officers-only lifts.

I take the hint and follow in silence
as we find the right lift and head up to the officer’s levels and
eventually a meeting room. There is no visible security in the
hallways, but I don’t scan to check for what must exist. Orien just
nods for me to enter first, trying not to look worried. I enter the
room to find it is full of baffles: I couldn’t scan anything in
here even if I wanted to. The only visual interface I have is through
the viewscreen, aural systems limited to basic human, vocal systems
at least untouched. Everything else is blocked.

The only inhabitants of the room are an
Adjudicator I don’t know in a far corner, the security chief of the
station whon I known is named Rodun, and the station chief herself,
the latter two studying a viewscreen of overlapping star systems. I
enter, stop, and start when Orien gives me a push from behind to move
closer to them. He moves beside me without a word, nodding to
everyone in the room.

“I do not recall authorizing anyone
to join you,” Sora says. She is tall and solid, her appearance
designed to be unremarkable and not noticed, her voice calm and
bland. You wouldn’t think she was a station chief to look at her,
which is entirely the point.

“You didn’t not do it,” I mumble.
“And he’s a friend.”

“Ah, yes.” Rodun is a tall, burly
man with a cold smile and colder eyes; he draws attention like
predators tend to, even to me. “I believe I briefed you on that.”

Sora blinks, then just nods. I’m glad
I don’t have my projection up, since I would be blushing furiously.
I know my face is in the viewscreen alone; Orien is just still and
quiet beside me. We’re moving in together. People talk. It’s
complicated.

“Six galaxy-class craft are
converging on a star system relatively close to Earth,” Sora says
crisply, the map changing in time with her words. “We have been
placed on high alert along with every other Docking Station. We are
not being told why, nor what they intend. All we know is that a craft
named Hope’s Chest dropped out of hyperspace and the
‘greeting’ for it feels more like an interception.”

“Oh.” My voice is very small, even
to my ears.

“There is almost no data on Hope’s
Chest on the infoweb. We believe it was removed some centuries
ago, but my people were able to ascertain you have accessed said
files in the past. We need to know what is going on. Please.”

“I –.” I lick my lips in the
viewscreen. It almost flickers off against my will. Orien presses a
hand to my chassis, saying nothing. Steadying. I extend a limb into
his hand and feel a little better. Less alone. Less me. “There were
three of them. Hope’s Diamond
was destroyed in friendly fire – aka blown to pieces by someone who
didn’t like it existing. Hope’s Reward
and Hope’s Chest
were sent through hingari space during the so-called first peace in
the war.

“As
far as I know, we’ve never been able to penetrate hingari space and
find out what lies beyond that. Hence
the wars with them, since we can’t get past them in hyperspace and
expanding in real-space is taking a very long time. That’s broadly
correct?”

“It is,” Sora
says.

“Okay. The
Hope-series were made to sneak through hingari lines. There was that
brief period where people who became transfers became part of the
engine of star ships, being an intelligence to help guide them but
people being paranoid about them caused a few to self-destruct and it
went badly. The Hope’s – all of them – were made and crewed
entirely by transfers. Less space needed, more efficient designs, and
they didn’t give off normal signatures so it was figured they could
punch through hingari space and out the other side. If more than the
three were made, it wasn’t made public knowledge at all. That one
has come back is – I don’t know. Anyone who knows about this will
be asking a lot of questions.

“Did the hingari
let it return is it a trap, what are the crew and how many survived?”
Sora says.

“Did it appear in
an inhabited system by chance,” the security chief adds quietly.

“That,
yes.” I let go of Orien’s hand and begin to pace nervously in
front of them, rolling back and forth on the floor.
“Because six galaxy-class ships are going to fire on it and burn
Hope’s Chest into
nothing along with an entire inhabited system. They’ll
be too scared not to. ”

“You
can’t know that,” Sora says.

“I’m
a transfer. I know how people react to us. But it’s not about that:
it would be even worse if it was humans aboard Hope’s
Chest. The response, I mean. The
hingari have technology far beyond our own, so what lies beyond them?
Are they protecting us against something they themselves are
fighting? We don’t know. There are limits to what can be done to my
body, realistically. But a human body is a different story entirely
in yours eyes. Pure potential, most of it likely untapped.”

“Weapons,” the
security chief says grimly.

“And
they’re going to blow it up. If they can.” I move back beside
Orien, stop. “They could have turned the transfers into
ambassadors, and we’ll go and murder them without even seeking to
ask questions because fear is going to win out. Because it always
has.”

“Because
it has to,” Rodun
says. “We can’t very well let some unknown threat back in, even
if it is one of our making.”

“Thank
you. Both of you,” Sora says. “Hope’s Chest
has been broadcasting a request for a parley to every Docking Station
and starcruiser. We can do nothing for them save to reply, to offer
apologies. To hope that it might be different, if the other craft
returns later on. I will send them a message, and hope it is
something. I will watch it
burn, because we should not look away. You may go now.”

“But
–.”

“You do not need
to see this, Dar. I would rather you did not.”

The security chief
says nothing as the door slides open. I leave, with Orien close
behind. We make it back to his quarters in silence. Orien seals the
door as I stop in the middle of the room. My projection isn’t
capable of bleeding, or of tears. I don’t turn it on. He just wraps
his arms about my chassis in silence and holds me as I rock back and
forth on treads and make soft, wordless noises.

Somewhere, the past
is burning. Somewhere, a future that could be will never happen. And
I all I can do is mourn in private.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”